


brained

by fuckener



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Depression, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-30
Updated: 2014-07-30
Packaged: 2018-02-11 01:11:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2047485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuckener/pseuds/fuckener
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nobody can cure Shinji of himself.</p>
            </blockquote>





	brained

It starts happening more often. 

Shinji’s not in a good place, not right now. He hates the summertime for everything its brought him in the past and most days he just lies around, too warm, no appetite, thinking about things he’s long since learned his mind can't let go of. It's masochistic that way.

School is over, so he works by computer. He doesn't spend money and his dad does not call. The first week, he tears at an old pyjama top he’s had since high school while he’s wearing it and puts it in the trash after in worn, shredded little pieces. He tries to get rid of it before he can get caught; Kaworu knows, anyway, probably. Kaworu always seems to just - know.

The second week, Shinji gets mad at him for it. Why, if Kaworu knows him so well, why does he stay here? If Kaworu knows what his brain looks like - and Shinji knows with a terrified, bone-deep certainty that he _does_ \- why does he love him? What is he doing here? Why isn't he the one who's always scared?

“Shinji,” Kaworu says in his soft, patient voice. Shinji hates his voice; loves it so much the sound makes him want to die on nights like these. He touches his palm to Shinji’s sweaty forehead and smiles like things are okay, even though Shinji is who Shinji is. “I will never be scared of you.”

It’s terrible, how easily the smallest words can make him cry. Never. Always. Love. Hate. Kaworu never cries. Kaworu never wants to cry around Shinji, he'd say, and he'd kiss Shinji like every inch of his skin isn't poison.

Therapy, again. More medication. It’s so unfair. The doctor has pictures of her children on the wall, and Shinji thinks there’s something tactical in that: happy family photos dotting the walls so that every horrible interaction with his father or his mother's grave stutter to life in his head like a television set going from channel to channel, one bad memory to the next. He doesn't talk about Kaworu until the fifth week, when the sun's at its hottest, and at home Kaworu has been sleeping on the couch for six days without protest.

“Your partner,” the doctor says. She adjusts her glasses. Shinji swallows and breaks eye-contact with her and does not remember with abrupt, harrowing detail what life was like trying to love all the girls who hated him.

“Yes,” he says, but that word is too small, he thinks, and it does not encapsulate the way it felt this morning to wake up early and lie in bed until he knew Kaworu had definitely left for work, to shuffle cautiously out the bedroom and find a sheet and pillow neatly folded on the sofa, to find his breakfast already made on the kitchen counter. It does not encapsulate the way love makes Shinji beat bruises into his own heart like it was intended to kill.

She presses him for details on how he feels towards his orientation - uncomfortable, he concedes. How would he feel if his parents knew? Uncomfortable, he concedes. How does he feel when he’s with his partner in public? Uncomfortable, he concedes. How does he feel talking about it now? “Uncomfortable,” he concedes.

There's silence for a few moments. She’s waiting.

“I’m a disappointing son,” he says, but he knew already. He's always known. He stares down at his hands, fumbling his fingers, looking for scars on the skin that do not exist. “A disappointing - person, maybe.”

She writes something. He imagines all the distinct possibilities: whiny, self-defeating, masochistic, parental issues, self-obsessed, fundamentally unlovable. She says, “Does he think so?”

“Who?”

“Your partner.”

No, like a reflex. No, Kaworu loves him even when he feels like he's disappointing everyone in the world. Kaworu loves him even though it's so completely unadvisable, he thinks, and imagines it scrawled on her notepad, the characters sharp and black and cutting.

Kaworu loves him so much he leaves Shinji alone when he asks. He does not play piano when it makes Shinji irritable to hear. He cancels Shinji's plans with Touji so Shinji doesn't have to agonize over bad excuses for hours before making the call. He keeps quiet in the next room over, trying to disappear for him, but he can't, and Shinji always knows he's there, waiting, all-knowing, all-loving. Opening the door is sometimes too scary.

It's better, after a few days on a higher dosage of antidepressants. Shinji stops thinking from existential planes so much and lets Kaworu back into the room. Shinji works, eats, medicates, sleeps. His head is soothed for all its silence. His emotions slip away quietly, like they were never there, like he never screamed them from the balcony after he couldn't even get past the railing, like his heart is not tied to the rest of him by long needles instead of veins.

Sometimes it helps at night, in all that darkness and the stifling heat of August in Japan, to kick his underwear off with the bedsheets and press into Kaworu's side. Kaworu kisses his hair even where it’s matted, slides his hand along the curve of Shinji’s back, hums old songs they used to play together, side by side on the piano stool - sometimes that's all Shinji needs to sleep. Sometimes, even despite the pills effect on his already almost non-existent libido, he kisses Kaworu through his song and hikes his pale legs around his waist and loses himself in togetherness. Kaworu looks up at him like loving Shinji is all he needs to be happy, and that's all he needs to come most nights, desperate and shaking and whispering promises he has never learned how to keep: I'll be better, I can be better, for you I can be well. Kaworu just smiles at him, says in his soft, patient voice, “I love you, Shinji. I love you.”

Sometimes in the night, Kaworu's skin brushes his beneath the sheets, and Shinji balks into his pillow, crushes it around his head and dreams of the outline of himself in empty, empty rooms.


End file.
